


Raised by Wolves

by what_alchemy



Category: Velvet Goldmine
Genre: Addiction, Adoption, Class Issues, Jack London, M/M, Music, Past Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-21 02:02:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6033937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Curt Wild stumbles his way to respectability.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1989

_“He was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he had drawn.”_ — Jack London, _The Call of the Wild_

 

Curt hung up the phone. God, but he wanted a drink.

A hit. A bump. Anything.

He didn’t go get one, though. That was the thing about clean living: there wasn’t a trick. There was no trade secret you got access to after some nebulous number of years of sobriety. You just knew, down deep somewhere in the wearied lake of your aortal tissue, that foundational part of you where self-destruction warred with self-preservation, that the stuff (the good stuff) wasn’t for you. And getting there is a switch in the brain nothing can force. In the end, it’s simple. Not easy — never fuckin’ easy on the nights he hurt so bad it seemed he’d never see the sun again — but simple. 

Arthur kept his chips for him in a drawer Curt never opened. He hated the damn things, hated the people who got up there and told their little sob stories about how they came to love smack so much. The whole racket was a no-brainer: smack was fantastic. A smooth-hot hug for all your frayed synapses. That was another thing that was easy: loving the thing that would kill you someday, sooner rather than later. The real question was, could you choose your own life over the false, hollow, _fleeting_ happiness that can never love you back? 

Yeah, Curt hated those people. Puffy junkies with purple veins, scars blossoming like tumors on the insides of their elbows. And they’re all junkies ’til the day they kick the bucket, no matter how long it’s been since they plumped up a vein, and they have to _accept themselves_. The thing was, Curt knew he was one of those sorry motherfuckers. He’d spent a long time not caring if he lived or died, in and out of rehab, using alcohol instead of smack as if that were any better, and he hated the reminder he got of what he really was every time he went to a meeting. He didn’t even smoke anymore. 

He sprung out from behind his desk and slung his bomber on as he slipped out the door.

—

It was late when he got home. New Order was on the record player, pumping heavy between the walls of the loft, but Curt didn’t recognize the album. Arthur looked up from the liner notes he was engrossed in, glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose. All the veins in Curt’s chest decided to strangle his heart at the sight.

“Hey,” Arthur said. The tip of his tongue darted out to wet the plush bow of his lower lip. Curt shucked his jacket and strode over to push Arthur’s glasses up with the tip of one finger.

“Hey,” he said, smoothing his hand down Arthur’s neck. “Sorry to be late, was at a meeting.”

Arthur leaned into the touch, lines deepening between his brows. He set the record sleeve down in his lap.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yeah, o’ course,” Curt said. “New album?”

“S’called _Technique_ ,” Arthur said. “I’m feeling it out.”

“Yeah? And what do you think?”

Arthur shrugged. 

“Too much dance and not enough nihilism for my tastes,” he said. “But maybe it’ll grow on me.”

Curt nodded. He was meant to smile, maybe laugh a little, he knew, but he worried if he made a sound he’d break apart. Arthur tugged on his hand and Curt sat down beside him. He swallowed and drew in a slow breath instead of jittering straight out of his human suit.

“Seriously, mate,” Arthur said. “You all right?”

“Got a phone call today,” Curt said. He looked at Arthur, whose head was tilted just so, brown eyes inquisitive over the thick frames of his glasses. “From Trevor.”

Arthur’s eyebrows bounced upward.

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“And how is he?”

“Ever the Englishman,” Curt said, bumping his shoulder into Arthur’s. “You, not Trevor. He’s terrible at the whole stiff upper lip thing. Blubs at any provocation, you know him.”

Arthur shrugged in that way he had, where he withdrew and became smaller at the same time. Curt plucked the record sleeve from his lap and sent it skimming the floor toward the far wall, where all their hundreds of records lived. He turned his body enough to tangle his legs with Arthur’s and bunched his hands in the soft excess of Arthur’s shirt.

“Don’t be that way,” he said. “S’nothing bad.”

“Sent you to an NA meeting.”

“Well, yeah, because I’m a fuck-up and everything sends me to an NA meeting,” Curt said, and that earned him the curve of Arthur’s pretty cupid bow. Curt wanted to lick it. Instead, he sucked in a deep breath. “He wants me to come to London.” Specifically, he wanted Curt to go in with him on a studio he’d found and write a new album with a band Trevor called “simpatico with your vision, mate.” Whatever his vision was.

“Oh.”

“I’m not going, obviously,” Curt said. “I’ve got the bar and you’ve got _The Herald_ and we’ve got this place. It was just a thought and now it’s passed.”

Arthur got up with a sigh. He walked over to the opposite side of the room and leaned over the record player to turn it off. The sudden silence muted even the sounds of the city, alive and pulsing outside. He straightened, back to Curt, before scrubbing his hands through his hair. When he turned back around, he looked like the boy he’d been almost fifteen years earlier, rosy-cheeked and bewildered. Curt let himself sag against the couch cushions.

“It hasn’t though, has it?” Arthur said. “If it had, you wouldn’t go to a meeting and you wouldn’t be in here half-buzzing like you sucked down five espressos from that shop ’round the corner.” 

“Arthur, I haven’t cut a record in almost ten years,” Curt said. “I’m done with that stuff.” Too old, too sober, too tired. Writing, recording, performing — it all belonged to a different life. 

Arthur smiled at him, but it hurt more than comforted.

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “Music, art — it’s in you, a living, breathing thing, all the time. I see it every day. You just…push it down.”

Curt tucked his chin into his chest and looked at his hands. His nail polish was chipping. Maybe blue next time, a dark, shimmery one.

“What’s stopping you, Curt?”

Curt looked up at him, shrugging helplessly.

“You don’t love the bar that much,” Arthur went on. “Which leaves me, and fear. And I’ll not be your excuse to be miserable, love.”

“Your job—”

“Is replaceable.”

“Your family—”

“England’s big enough for all of us, I imagine.”

“Margaret Thatcher.”

“Do you really think she’s any worse than Reynolds or Bard?”

“Arthur, I _can’t._ ”

Arthur came back to the couch and stared down at him, head cocked. Curt blinked.

“D’you wanna know what I think?” Arthur said.

“A litany of my flaws?” Curt said, lips twisting in a poor facsimile of a smile. “Always.” 

“No, love,” Arthur said. He reached out and just barely touched the hank of hair that framed Curt’s face. “Just some observations. And rebuttals.”

Curt swept his hands out in invitation.

“Have at it,” he said. Arthur drew his hands back and stood up as straight as he had it in him.

“Number one,” he said, “everything’s overwhelming right now. Every little thing to be done’s crowding your brain for attention, and you think it’s impossible to move countries when we’ve got this flat with all this stuff in it and the bar and I’ll need to hustle for a new job. But the truth is we can take a long view of it all: plan to move in about a year and in the meantime get rid of nonessentials, put the flat and the bar up for sale and scout for a new place with a trip or two, take everything in good time. And my job’ll work itself out.”

“Right,” Curt said. He leaned up and hooked his fingers in Arthur’s belt loops to draw him forward. He stumbled toward him, smirking but undeterred. 

“Number two, you worry that the music is incompatible with sobriety.” Curt’s heart splashed into his stomach, gaze snapping to Arthur’s face. His mouth fell open, and he earned that damnable gentle look Arthur got sometimes. “There’ll be NA meetings in London, love,” Arthur said. “I’ll be there, and Trevor’s a good bloke who won’t parade that shite in front you. You’ve got more than four years under your belt, and I’m prouder of you than I’ve any right to be. You’re going to be fine.”

Curt let his face flop into the surface of Arthur’s belly, a solid flat expanse just now going a bit soft. He felt very tender about that bit of soft. When he closed his eyes, he could pretend that all there was was the smell of Arthur, his softness, his hands stroking through his hair. 

“Number three,” Arthur said, voice an electric echo shivering down Curt’s spine from this vantage. The pause went on too long, and Curt closed his arms around Arthur’s hips to hug him close. Arthur cleared his throat like a clap of thunder through Curt’s innards. “Number three. You worry that you still love Brian.” Curt squeezed his eyes shut harder, breath gone stagnant and still. “That somehow, if you’re where he is, you’ll get sucked into his orbit again and get torn apart, because he can’t help it. You worry you won’t be able to help yourself either, because you think he’s one of your addictions too, and maybe you even worry that _I_ won’t be able to help myself, but Curt—”

Curt reared back and yanked Arthur onto the couch. Arthur landed heavily on top of him and struggled to right himself, but Curt wrapped his legs around his hips and locked him up tight.

“He’d love taking you from me,” he said. The ragged quality of his voice surprised him. “He’d love to see us both destroyed after the stunt we pulled, and just for the fuck of it, just because he’s Brian. And you can’t deny he was who you really wanted, once upon a time.”

“Jesus, Curt,” Arthur said, propping himself up with hands planted on either side of Curt’s head. “I was a bloody _child_ lusting after a pop star, hardly the stuff of true love.”

“ _I_ was a pop star.”

“How long have you been thinking this rubbish?” Arthur said. “Five years? Fifteen?”

“It’s not like that,” Curt said. “It’s just — I couldn’t blame you if you wanted a taste of the thing you always wanted, could I?”

“Curt, Jesus.” Arthur’s huff of breath passed over Curt’s face, smelling faintly of tea and shortbread. “Brian’s gossamer and smoke. He’s not even Brian anymore, if he ever was. I wouldn’t go near if I was promised a million dollars and this year’s Pulitzer. You and me — that’s real, yeah?” He pressed his pelvis into Curt’s. They were neither of them hard, but it wouldn’t take much. That aspect of their relationship had never been their problem. Fits of addiction, self-loathing, silence, and unfounded paranoia and jealousies — those had been their problems. They were getting better at the feelings thing, but at the end of the day, they were still a pair of emotional cripples raised by people who hated everything they were. It made sex the easy way out, especially when it could be such great sex, when they weren’t playing so hard at being old marrieds. But Curt never said he was too good for the easy way out. 

Curt let his hands creep over the fabric of Arthur’s sensible journalist khakis, the ones that did nothing for his ass. He gave said ass a rough squeeze before sliding his hands down into his briefs and pulling his cheeks apart. Arthur grunted, and Curt felt Arthur’s cock harden against his own. 

“Tell me it’s real before you fuck me,” Arthur panted. “Tell me it’s real before I let you inside.”

Curt tucked his fingers into the slit of Arthur’s ass and rubbed firmly over his hole. It contracted against his fingertips and Arthur choked on a gasp.

“You’re the only real thing I’ve ever had,” Curt said.

“This isn’t about Brian,” Arthur said. “It’s never been about Brian.”

Sometimes, at his lowest points, when the needle felt as good as the heroin, Curt wondered if his entire life had been about Brian. _What a waste,_ he’d think, tearing himself up. But Arthur — letting himself have Arthur had never been about Brian, and he wasn’t a consolation prize. Not that first night on the roof, and not even when they met again five years ago. He’d always felt like an exception. A bright star that shone for Curt alone. His own personal taste of freedom. And in that way, he felt temporary, even when he whispered quiet devotionals in the swallowing shadows of their bedroom, even when he opened up around him and let Curt try to make them into a single beast replete with sensation and emotion. Maybe it wasn’t that Arthur and Brian were inextricably tangled in the pathetic map of Curt’s battered heart, but that some days, despite the Technicolor domesticity of strewn laundry, rough feet, petty squabbles, clogged drains and farts in bed, Arthur felt as unreal to him as Brian ever had. 

He hoped it was enough to kiss Arthur instead of telling him all the things he couldn’t form the words for, things like _I’m sorry I’m such a fuck-up_ and _you were always going to leave me someday_ and _let me keep you a little longer. Let me feel how you beat in my heart and always have. Let me feel like I have one person who knows me and stays, just a little longer._

He hoped it was enough.


	2. 1990

_“And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.”_ — Jack London, _The Call of the Wild_

 

The only reason Curt wasn’t in central booking right now was because the yuppie he’d assaulted had an open bottle of half-drunk wine in his car and alcohol on his breath. 

He’d been crossing the street to get to dinner with Arthur when some fucking jagoff in a Benz rounded the corner too fast and almost hit him. Curt took this as his cue to whip the door open and drag the motherfucker out of his car. Arthur came running out of the restaurant, stopped him from ruining the shithead’s nose job, _and_ convinced the motherfucker that he’d be in deep shit if he called the police. He bundled Curt up like a toddler having a tantrum and marched him away from the entire scene. 

It was a week until they left for London, and they weren’t even living in the loft anymore. It had sold quickly, and if the bar had taken a little longer, it caused no undue stress. They were living out of one suitcase and one backpack each in a hotel, their records and guitars and equipment and books already packed up and on their way to Trevor at the studio. They were meant to be celebrating the move, the sales, Arthur’s last day at _The Herald_ , everything.

But Curt fucked it up. As usual. 

By the time they got to their room, Arthur still hadn’t said a word to him, and he closed the door quietly behind them where Curt would have wanted a satisfying slam. Curt flung his coat on the floor and kicked his boots off only to stub his toe on a bed frame, and he would have yelled “ _fuck!_ ” if there were breath in his lungs to do it with.

“Jesus, Curt, you’ve got to calm down!” Arthur said. 

Curt tipped sideways into bed, but he managed to gasp, “It speaks!”

“Oh, fuck off, Curt,” Arthur said. Through the slit of his eyelids, Curt watched him pick up the coat on the floor and hang it neatly in the closet together with his own. His shoulders were slumped as he leaned on the wall to untie his shoes. Curt ground his teeth together and turned away. 

The bed dipped with Arthur’s weight, and his hands were too cautious when they skimmed over Curt’s foot.

“Nothing broken, I presume?” Arthur said. 

“M’fine,” Curt muttered. He rolled his shoulders inward and shoved his hands between his knees. He heard Arthur let out a noisy sigh.

“What’s got into you lately?” he said. 

“ _Nothing_ , fuck, why’s everything the goddamn third degree with you?”

Cool air where once there was a hand on his ankle. _There’s something really fucking wrong with you, Wild_ , Curt thought. For a long time, he listened to the radiator, the traffic, the work of two sets of lungs in keeping body and soul together as best they could.

“I used to know where I stood with you,” Arthur said, quiet. “Or at least I thought I did. I used to think you were as mad for me as I was for you. We made all these plans, and now… Now you don’t talk to me, and when you do it’s to bite my head off. Every little thing sets you off. It makes me think I imagined this whole thing in some kind of fever dream where the friendless fairy gets his man. So I don’t know what to do, Curt. And if you think my asking after you is some kind of huge burden, well. I don’t know how to fix it, either.”

Curt’s chest was almost too heavy to flip onto his other side, but he managed it after a moment. He peered up at Arthur, who had reclined against the hotel pillows and was occupied inspecting his nails instead of looking at Curt.

“I need to know if we’re still in this together,” Arthur said. “I can’t — I can’t move across the world if it’s not with you, Curt. I just can’t.”

 _“Then fucking don’t, you coward,”_ didn’t trip out of his mouth, but it was a near thing. Impulse control was a new concept he was trying out these days. It was hit or miss, obviously. He didn’t mean it anyway. London without Arthur was a horror Curt wasn’t about to contemplate. New York without Arthur unfurled in his imagination and proved just as desolate. Curt without Arthur — an endless wash of grey fading in and out until he dried up and blew away, surely.

Must mean he loved him, or some complete horse shit like that.

“I’m a sack of shit,” Curt said, low. Arthur’s lashes swept downward, but he still didn’t look at him. “The only good thing I’ve ever done is hitch my wagon to yours.”

Arthur let out a long breath. 

“You think that’s a romantic thing to say, mate, but it’s not,” Arthur said. “It’s shite. A fucking cop-out.”

Curt did his best to shrug, but it didn’t really work out. _Sorry_ was likely to make Arthur sigh and curl into a ball in the corner of the bed right now, and Curt didn’t know what else there was to say. Declaring his own shittiness should have been enough. Maybe a subject change? He cleared his throat.

“Do you ever think about your family?” he said, and wanted to die. 

Suddenly, Arthur’s eyes were sharp on him, brows drawn into a furrow.

“What’s that to do with anything?”

“It’s just a question.”

Arthur’s mouth flattened into the closest expression he had to a scowl. His nostrils flared and the grooves on his forehead deepened.

“Once in a while,” he said, and swallowed. He looked away. “I wonder what my mum’s doing. My da and my brother — they can go hang, I reckon. But my mum. I worry. She’s sixty this year, you know?”

Curt nodded. Arthur met his eyes again. He wetted his lips.

“Are you gonna look them up?” Curt asked. Arthur shook his head. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I figured.”

“Curt…”

Curt closed his eyes. Arthur shifted so they lay side by side. A deep breath would send their noses into collision. Hands so careful they made Curt want to scream reached out for him, one on his hip, one settling against his own in the space between them.

“Maybe…” Arthur chewed his lip and took a breath. “Maybe we can take a few days, go up to Michigan. I’ve never seen the upper peninsula.”

Curt snorted, not opening his eyes. The burning behind his eyelids had to pass first. He groped at Arthur’s fingers, and they locked tight around his own.

“You’ve never seen any part of Michigan.”

“Oi, I’ve been to Detroit.”

“Oh, well then, that’s all you need to know.”

“Curt. We’ve got the time.”

Curt took in a deep lungful of air. He leaned his forehead against Arthur’s and they breathed it together.

—

Curt hadn’t been back to Broken Tusk since 1964, when he blew the driver of a semi blasting rock and roll for his ticket out. He was seventeen and no one came looking for him. Now, he was surprised to find that more than twenty-five years hadn’t dulled his knowledge of the winding roads leading to the trailer park, even with fresh snowfall disguising the landmarks and dampening all sound until he thought he detected, for the first time since he was a kid, true silence. It made him feel as if the immensity of the universe were bearing down on him, and he was a speck of dirt beneath the notice of the stars.

When they got the rental in Lansing, Arthur had offered to drive, but Curt waved him and his stack of Michigan maps off. His hands on the wheel knew the way. 

They drove for four hours, talking about nothing, mix tapes blaring from the console. Arthur had surprised him by producing them from his backpack, said he knew they had a long trip ahead and might as well enjoy it. If Curt were the man he’d been when they first met, he would have swept him up into a kiss right there in the airport. But he wasn’t that man anymore. He’d never managed to exercise whatever muscle it was that caused people to care about the opinions of faceless, unknowable others, and it had atrophied beyond repair, but he cared about what Arthur thought. And Arthur was reserved in the broad, manful expanse of his adulthood. He was a quiet, watchful man who sought the story rather than seeking to become it. Sometimes Curt thought Arthur could do with a little shaking up, maybe get some goddamn color in his wardrobe for fuck’s sake, man, but in this, Curt wouldn’t be the thing that made Arthur into a Michigan myth. So he settled for a wink and savored the way he could still make Arthur blush and tuck a smile back between his teeth as if he weren’t a grown man with a serious, respectable career, as if the two of them hadn’t spent the last six years building an ordinary, mundane life out of extraordinary, monumental love.

Thick tree cover gave way to ramshackle towns, each more dilapidated than the last. Some of them hadn’t seen repairs since the ’50s. The few gentle inches of snow should have given them the glistening air of something out of fairy tales, but instead it just made everything look increasingly desolate. Curt’s heart flipped and started doing double-time. 

“Are you nervous?” Arthur asked when Curt grew more silent. He tried to stop white-knuckling the steering wheel. 

“I feel like I need a meeting,” Curt said. Arthur laid his hand on Curt’s thigh and gave it a squeeze. 

“We can find a diner and call Neil if you want,” he said. 

“I can’t go running to my sponsor every time I want to get obliterated,” Curt snapped. “I’m not some baby with a one day chip in my hand.”

Arthur took his hand away and turned to look out the window. Roofless barns and gutted cars that might have been called classic if anyone had kept them up. Curt ground his teeth together and reached for Arthur’s hand again.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Yeah, I’m nervous, and I’m feeling it, but I can handle it. I’m glad you’re with me.”

Arthur turned his hand up and slotted their fingers together. 

“Were you able to find a number for your mum? Or sister?”

Curt shook his head. The Wilds were not a people who ever left the trailer park. If they had, it was to go to another trailer park, no doubt, and someone at the old one would know which new one had seduced them away. Or, more likely, which one didn’t care that they’d been evicted. He did not come from stock that had the capacity to rise above. Sometimes he wondered how the hell Arthur could bear to be seen in public with him. Crass and uncouth in twenty-year-old combat boots, torn-up clothes and worn-out leather jacket with the hair and eyeliner to match and no idea of how to be any other way. He may have made some money in his time, but, in the words of his first manager upon severing their business relationship, money can’t buy class. And yet, disappointment was never something that touched Arthur’s eyes when he looked at Curt. When Curt did something like drag a yuppie out of a running car, sure, but never this. Never the misshapen mold he sprung from, damaged and alone. Never the wolves nipping at his heels.

Curt squeezed Arthur’s hand.

—

Curt knew they were there because all that was left was the sign.

 _Ivy Acres_ , it declared from a washed-out post, faded from weather and neglect. Behind it, the desolation of fire. Years back, by the sunken, blackened ruin they found, stretching back as far as Curt could see. No lights. No plowed roads. Only the skeletons of trailers and cars, just barely covered by snow.

“Oh, fuck,” Arthur murmured. 

Curt left the car on for the headlights, but got out and pushed his hands through his hair, tugging as he took in the dereliction. Behind him, he heard a car door slam, and then Arthur was beside him, bundled up in the deeply unfashionable down parka Curt had made him buy for the trip, face tucked into the collar. 

Curt tipped his face up to the moon and screamed until his throat was raw, until the tracks on his face were frozen in place. At the edges of his perception, he imagined the trees in the distance shook with it, the birds took flight, the ground trembled. He lunged at the sign and hauled his leg back to kick it, again and again and again until it too splintered, and he kept going until it was kindling in the the snow.

“Never, never, never, never!” he was chanting. When the sign gave, he buckled into the snow and looked up at the rolling glitter of the Milky Way, gasping for breath. Maybe he could make smoke rings.

Arthur’s head popped into his field of vision to block out Orion’s belt.

“Are you all right?”

“Make a snow angel with me.”

“You’re going to be soaked, love.”

“C’mon, babe,” Curt said. “Light of my trailer park. Wind beneath my food stamp.”

Somewhere in the black hole of that parka, a smile. 

Arthur fidgeted beside him. He anchored his head against Curt’s. Finally, he tucked his frozen hands into Curt’s jeans.

“Jesus fuck!”

“Sorry,” Arthur said. Not sorry enough though, clearly, so Curt stuck his own hands beneath the parka, and the sweatshirt, and the tee to get to the belly he sought. Arthur yelped. 

“Maybe if we turn the headlights off and wait awhile, we’ll see the northern lights,” Curt said.

A muffled shifting. Eyes on him.

“Really? Can you see those up here?”

“Yeah, sometimes,” Curt said. “It was the only thing that made all this — it was the only thing.”

They watched the stars for a while. Curt stopped being able to feel his ears. His nose. His eyeballs.

“Maybe we can find a phone book,” Arthur said after a long time, words plumes in the air. “Look them up.”

“Nah,” Curt said. His mouth sealed over the rest of all the things he wanted to say and never had. About Jerry and the latrine. Uncle Charlie watching, hand rhythmic in his shorts. Regina, just a baby herself, crying into her cot as she miscarried for the third time. Dad with vodka on his breath, the magnet in his fist a match for the one on Mom’s face. The way she’d never said a word about the blood in Curt’s underwear. The way she told him to shut the fuck up or she’d cook him up for his dad and uncles to eat. The names. The treatments that made him shit the bed and forget whole chunks of his childhood. The burnt, acrid taste of vomit that lived on the back of his tongue for years. 

Maybe someday he’d be able to tell Arthur. Maybe someday he wouldn’t need to.

“I’m proud to know you,” Arthur said, soft. 

Curt’s breath shuddered out of him, a long rolling mist.

 _You wouldn’t be if you knew about me_ , he thought. Or tried to think. It was his usual response. Reflex. His mind was curiously empty where the thought used to be. Here, in the cold ruin of his boyhood home, underneath the stars and the cold wash of the headlights, he was left with nothing on the tip of his tongue but gratitude.

“Thank you,” he said. 

“Where do you think it goes?” Arthur asked.

“Where what goes?” Curt said.

“Anger. Grief. All the things we feel but can’t see.”

Curt pulled his hand out of Arthur’s shirt and pointed at something that was so bright it must have been a planet. Mercury, maybe, or Venus.

“Out there,” he said, “where it grows up fat and hungry. By the time it bounces back, it’s been a billion years, and it’s someone, something else’s to bear.”

“Sounds sad,” Arthur said, and Curt shrugged.

“It’s the price we pay for being alive,” he said. “It’s the entrance fee for getting the chance to grasp at happiness.”

Icicle hands yanked themselves from his pants and cupped his cheeks instead. Thumbs rubbed over his cheekbones, and when he turned his head, Arthur’s eyes held the entire universe. 

They climbed into the backseat of the rental, where Curt had stashed blankets and a cooler full of sandwiches and water in case they’d gotten lost. They turned the lights off and waited for the atmosphere to make its own.


	3. 1996

_“He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.”_ — Jack London, _The Call of the Wild_

 

Technically, the kids were his great-niece and great-nephew.

“Great-niblings,” Arthur had said helpfully, back when they’d first heard of them and Curt’s eyebrows lived somewhere in the vicinity of the ceiling for a week. “‘Nibling’ is the gender-neutral term for the children of one’s siblings. So. Great-niblings.”

“Fuckin’ nerd,” Curt had said, and Arthur’s answering grin was near feral. 

Technically, they were Regina’s grandkids. Technically, her youngest daughter Crystal was some kind of addict like everyone else in the whole blighted clan, and last year she’d blown into Broken Tusk to dump off two more little shitkickers before disappearing again, but these most recent shitkickers were a few shades too brown for the likes of northern Michigan. And wasn’t it convenient that Gran had a brother doing well for himself far far away they didn’t have to see but could still call on in their time of need?

Curt and Arthur pretended to think on it for weeks, but the truth was, those kids were theirs the moment Regina’s voice came down the line casually calling her own grandchildren racial slurs as if they were endearments.

“We can’t leave them there, love,” Arthur said, and Curt had started making plans. Obviously they weren’t about to leave some helpless children with people who had named them Jopplin’ Jay and Jagger Garcia, no matter how hard they may come to rock someday. They’d work it out, splitting their time at the studio better. Arthur would finally hire some PR underlings to help with the press, and Curt could take on fewer producing gigs, but they’d make it happen.

So, the blood in their veins matched Curt’s, but it was Arthur who’d ironed everything out legally. It was Arthur who made sure the adoption was ironclad — in Curt’s name only, because they may have been living in the enlightened ’90s, but a pair of queers playing house was never gonna be good enough for the courts to sign off on giving them some kids together. It was Arthur who’d tracked down Crystal, who was only too happy to sign her kids away, even to a pair of fuckin’ glitter bombs, and it was Arthur who’d forced her to sign an agreement that promised she’d never, ever come to Curt for money. It was Arthur who read up on attachment disorders and displacement trauma, on the minimization of further trauma-by-name-change, on pediatric nutrition and Gotcha Days and age-appropriate games and videos and every little fucking thing that made Curt’s head threaten to pop off like a ripe pimple. 

It was Arthur who took to the whole “Dad” thing as if he’d been waiting his entire life for the stork to drop a baby or two in his lap.

Right, so they weren’t exactly _babies_. Maybe Curt could have done better if they were. Maybe if he’d raised him up from spuds with his own two hands they wouldn’t peer at him with such suspicion and skepticism. Or maybe he would have fucked it all up worse, rotted them straight from the very root.

Hazel was six, and Jamie had just turned five. They blinked giant brown eyes at him from beneath matching mops of silky black ringlets Arthur didn’t have the heart to get cut. Curt wanted to sproing them all the time but he didn’t dare reach out, especially when they were standing in front of him like this wearing nothing but their own recalcitrance. 

“But we don’t want to go to school,” Hazel said. 

“You really have to, though,” Curt said. “And you need clothes when you go.”

“But I don’t have any _mates_ ,” Jamie said.

Five months in London had set their vocabulary and their accents a bit wonky. Arthur thought it was adorable and assured him that being so young, they’d both lose the American in their voices sooner rather than later. 

“You’ll make some,” Curt said. He knelt before them and waved some underwear at Jamie like a white flag. “Come on, Nibbles.”

“No,” Hazel said. Curt felt as though he were caught under water. He felt like that a lot these days.

“Hazel, I’m not playing. Come on and get dressed now. You can wear whatever you want. A top hat. Jamie’s tutu.”

“No.”

“Hell no!” Jamie said.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Jamie said.

“Shit, don’t you start.”

“Shitting fucky Christ!” 

Hazel pitched herself to the ground and began rolling around across the rugs and the hardwood while she cackled out some kind of demonic laugh. She was getting fuzzies and bits of dirt all over her skin and hair. 

“Hey, stop that! Hazel!”

Jamie took off running, probably to dip his entire head in the toilet and rub his hair on everything like last time. 

Curt, clutching a pair of kid underwear in each hand, bunched his fists against his eyes. He let the screams and the squawks wash over him as he slumped on the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut loose.

They were going to be late to school. Again.

—

The scene Arthur came home from the studio to: Curt attempting to get toffee out of Hazel’s hair while her clothes dripped on the floor and her screams destroyed his eardrums. In the music room, Jamie clattered on the remains of a drum set Curt should never have left lying around.

“Thank fuck,” Curt said, dragging the comb too hard through a curl at the sight of him. Hazel _howled_ and reared back only to sink her teeth into his arm. Curt shrieked, Arthur dropped his messenger bag and came running, and Jamie skidded into the room and leapt up to grab Curt’s hair and yank with all the force of his forty pounds while bellowing into his ear. 

“Stop!” Arthur shouted. “Jamie, stop, for God’s sake! Hazel!”

“I hate you!” Hazel spat, stumbling onto the floor as she let go. The wet shirt and the tears bursting out of her failed to mitigate how like one of the Furies she looked, fierce and righteous. Arthur had wrangled Jamie and had him in some kind of lock-hug and was making Significant Eyebrows at Curt.

“What?” Curt hissed, gripping the teethmarks on his forearm. His neck burned where Jamie had given him whiplash.

 _Hug her_ , Arthur mouthed. Curt scowled and shook his head violently. Arthur’s brows flattened with a dead-eyed look of consternation, even with a little kid wriggling madly in his grasp. 

_Fuck off,_ Curt mouthed back. 

“What happened here?” Arthur said.

“He’s trying to scalp me!”

“What?”

“What the hell do you know about scalping?” Curt said.

“Not the point, Curt!” Arthur said. 

“Some little motherfucker put toffee in her hair at school,” Curt said. “I was _trying_ to get it out and she’s not cooperating!”

“A little Motherfucker!” Jamie chirped. 

“It fucking _hurts!_ ” Hazel wailed.

Arthur closed his eyes and expanded and contracted with a deep breath. When he opened his eyes again, he met Curt’s and pinched his lips together as if Curt were the most inept sack of shit who ever thought he could take care of some kids.

“Did you try olive oil?” he asked, his tone tightly measured and controlled. Curt ground his teeth together and crosses his arms over his chest.

“Why the hell would I try olive oil?”

“Because it’s what you do, Curt!”

“I washed it with shampoo!”

“Is that why her clothes are soaked? Christ, Curt, why didn’t you take them off her first?”

“Personal privacy, mate!”

“And Jesus, look at that!” Arthur’s chin jerked in Hazel’s direction. “Shampoo’s not about to break down the bloody toffee, is it?”

“How the hell am I supposed to _know_ that, Arthur?”

Arthur ignored him in favor of whispering in Jamie’s ear until he went limp in his arms and nodded. He set him down and he ran off in the direction of the bedroom, probably to shove Legos up his nose or some shit like that. Kid was fuckin’ whackadoodle and Curt couldn’t even blame him. He came by it honestly.

Arthur knelt down in front of Hazel and smoothed her hair down. She began crying again and tipped forward until her head was resting on his shoulder. Arthur held her tight and Curt took a step backward, swallowing around the thickness that had gathered in the base of his throat. He felt like a ship unmoored, floating along in the vast expanse of the sea, no rescue on the horizon. His lungs felt tight.

Under Arthur’s arm and behind his back, Hazel’s hand came up, single most significant finger raised in Curt’s direction.

—

Much later, after the kids were in bed and the day was good and beat, Curt had a good sulk going in the corner of the bed when Arthur came back from brushing his teeth. He was perfectly prepared to be icy and terrible for the rest of the evening, but Arthur slipped into bed behind him and laid a big hand on the small of his back, right where Curt was most susceptible to appeals for forgiveness and/or sex

“Hey love,” he said. “Can we talk?” 

“Nothin’ to talk about.”

“Come on, Curt.”

Curt sighed and flopped over onto his back. He stared pointedly up at the ceiling as Arthur stroked over his chest and stomach.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for yelling at you like that,” Arthur said. Curt’s eyebrows drew down and he snuck a glance at him without moving his head. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Arthur’s mouth twist in a rueful smile. “I shouldn’t have let my temper get the best of me, especially in front of the nibbles. We need to work on that.”

“Oh.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Curt.”

“Thought you wanted to tell me how fucking awful I am.”

Arthur sighed.

“I’m never gonna do that, Curt.” Resigned. As if he’d said it a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand times before. He probably had, but Curt had never pretended he wasn’t the neediest motherfucker in any given room.

“But I make them swear and they hate me,” he said.

“They don’t hate you.”

“They do, you heard Hazel.”

“Curt, she’s six, and you were yanking her hair out.”

“I was trying to help!” 

“Hush, I know.” Arthur’s hand swept back up his chest to frame one half of Curt’s face. “Did you get the full story?”

“Some little shit called her the n-word and she kicked him in the shins and then there was toffee in her hair, yeah.” And Curt considered the fact that he didn’t track down said little shit to stomp his ass right off the edge of the world to be an act of profound mercy and maturity on his part. _And_ he talked the teacher out of a bullshit suspension she was holding over Hazel’s head. Talked, threatened with all the might and fury of the British press he had at his disposal, same thing.

“I don’t know what to do,” Arthur said, low, and finally Curt turned his head to look at him, mouth turned down.

“You always know what to do.”

“Not about this,” he said. “How do we deal with this? What do we even know about it?”

“Stomp colons?” Curt said, and Arthur laughed in that sad way he had sometimes. Curt shifted half onto his side to face him better. “I guess.” Curt cleared his throat. “I guess we muddle the fuck through. A billion other people do it every day.”

Arthur’s eyes closed, lashes dark against his cheek, and nodded. 

“Curt,” he said after a while.

“Hmm.”

“You never touch them.”

Curt turned abruptly onto his back again, swallowing thickly. Arthur’s hand slid back to lie limp between his pecs. 

“You can’t — you can’t parent from a minimum distance of a yard away, love. Sometimes you have to be elbow deep in the shit of it. I promise it’s worth it.”

“I can’t.”

“Curt. You’re fine.”

“What if I — what if it’s in me?” 

“It’s not, love, I promise.” 

“It’s in my family,” Curt said. “It runs in families, I read that. What if one day I see them and I—” He cut himself off with a shaky gasp.

Arthur sat up and ruffled a hand through his hair. He twisted around to look down at him.

“Curt,” he said. “Have you ever wanted to touch a kid the way you were touched? Any kid at all?”

 _Touched_ wasn’t quite the word for it, but it was better than any other. Something he could bear. Curt shook his head sharply. If he opened his mouth, he might disintegrate right here in this bed. A hell of a mess for Arthur to clean up. 

“You’re not your father,” Arthur said, cupping Curt’s cheek. He leaned down and kissed one of Curt’s eyes. Curt’s breath hitched. “You’re not your uncle.” His other eye. “You’re not your brother.” A cheekbone. “You’re Curt fucking Wild, and you’re the best thing that ever happened to those two kids down the hall.” 

Curt caught him and pulled him crashing down onto his own body, as if Arthur were the anchor that was going to save him from tipping off the edge of the horizon.

—

Days later, a studio session with a new band he and Trevor were producing had Curt’s blood up. A new sound for a new fuckin’ millennium. It made his fingers itch.

At home, he closed the door to the music room and plugged in the Fender Strat Jim Strand had given him in 1979. It was after dark, but early enough, and Curt figured the neighbors could go fuck themselves. He tuned it, discordant, bendy sounds that resonated when set to rights. He strummed a chord and his blood sang. He plucked out a new melody and the flood in his brain felt a lot like love. 

He lost track of time and his head felt dizzy from vigorous bobbing when there came a tug on his shirt. He blinked down to find Jamie, pouting up at him with a book dangling from his hand. The last notes he shredded lingered, and when they finally disappeared into the ether, Jamie breathed out a loud sigh.

“Daddy, you have to stop,” he said. The only thing that stopped as far as Curt was aware was his heart. 

_“What?”_ he said. _Daddy?_

“Daddy, you’re not very good.” Jamie managed to look apologetic and annoyed at the same time. “So you have to stop.”

Curt laughed to keep from crying. He set the Stratocaster down and reached out to pet Jamie’s hair, just a little. 

“What have you got there, Nibs?” he asked, nodding at the book in his hand. Jamie held it up and Curt took it from him, turned it over. His heart swelled when he saw it was a battered old copy of _The Call of the Wild_. He’d read it a million times when he was a kid, by flashlight in a spot in the forest where no one could find him. There under the trees and the stars, it was easy to imagine he was Buck, and someday he’d be free and whole and true. Through all the bullshit, through every move and every dumb decision he’d ever made, through the decades he’d clawed up to get here, he’d kept this one thing. The pages were yellowed, and they smelled stale and perfect. 

“There’s a dog on the cover,” Jamie said. “So we should get a dog.”

“Maybe when you’re older, kid,” Curt said, cuffing him gently on the shoulder. “You want me to read this to you?”

Jamie nodded.

“All right,” Curt said. “Go get Hazel, brush your teeth, and we’ll all go meet Arthur in his room, okay?”

Jamie squealed and bolted off. Curt was left with vague whiplash and the sense that he should be lucky there weren’t skidmarks blackening the hardwood. The only speeds Jamie had were “sprint” and “dead to the world.”

He put the guitar away and poked his head out to find Arthur reading on the couch. 

“Hey,” he said. Arthur looked up and smiled.

“You sounded good in there,” he said. 

“Not according to a certain little master, and, one assumes, his sister.”

“Everyone’s a critic,” Arthur said. 

“I, uh.” Curt shifted his weight from foot to foot and earned himself two raised eyebrows. “I told Jamie I’d read to them, if that’s all right. In our room.”

“Curt.” Arthur set the book aside. “You don’t have to ask permission.”

“Oh.”

“It sounds lovely,” Arthur said. “D’you want me there or is this some bonding time I should leave you alone for?”

“No!” Curt said. “No, please. Please come.”

Arthur took his glasses off and laid them aside. He stood and was before Curt in a single stride, running his hands down Curt’s arms until he circled his wrists. 

“This would suit you, you know,” he said. “If you’d let it.”

“What would?”

“Fatherhood.”

They kissed, but not for too long. Not with little masters waiting.

—

They stayed up too late and Curt’s voice grew hoarse, but for the first time since they’d brought Hazel and Jamie home, something a lot like peace settled over him. Jamie was tucked under his right arm, body half-slung over Curt’s to meet his sister’s, which flanked Curt from the other side. She was wedged between Arthur and him, starfishing out so her head and hips and limbs made everyone equally uncomfortable. Curt was overheated and his ass was asleep and his neck might never recover, but he looked over at Arthur and Arthur looked at him and he knew what it was to make a soulmate. They weren’t born, written in the stars, destiny and fate, nothing so facile and easy as that — they were hard work. They were the shared vision of a whole greater than the sum of its parts. They were grown like woven vines, separate and standing but stronger together. They were what happened when you never stopped trying to be better, and helping your lover be better too, even when you stumbled, even when you fell.

The kids were asleep and snuffling and it was long past time to turn in, but Curt had just reached one of his favorite passages. He set the book down, turned the light off, and eased as much onto his side as he could without disturbing his cubs. He met Arthur’s eyes over the chaos of Hazel’s hair.

“‘With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead,’” he said, voice nothing but a bramble in his throat now, “‘or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself — one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. And that he should be stirred by it marked the completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages.’”

The room was monochrome as his eyes adjusted to the dark. Arthur was gazing at him, eyes lit with awe. Curt wondered whose heartbeat it was he could hear through the silence.

“You’re bloody amazing, you know?” Arthur said, quiet. He leaned his head forward, and Curt let his skull rest against Arthur’s on the pillow. 

“Nah,” he said. “But it’s good to know I’ve got you hooked.”

“Prick,” Arthur said, curving mouth perfect as a harvest moon. 

Curt caught his hand and tugged it over Hazel’s body, pressed it over his own heart. Arthur’s eyelashes swept downward, and the two of them stayed like that until sleep crept up on them and their dreams turned the sky to Technicolor and ozone.


	4. 2013

_“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame.”_ — Jack London, _The Call of the Wild_

 

The morning paper might be passé, but both Curt and Arthur had a soft spot for it. Curt was just scratching his ass to his first coffee by morning light when Arthur dropped a heavy daily on the table in front of him. He didn’t even need his reading glasses to see it. 

**PARLIAMENT PASSES SAME-SEX MARRIAGE**

“Ah, fuck,” Curt grumbled, voice like gravel. 

“This is where we decide if we’re the kind of queers who get married,” Arthur said. “Quickly, before our daughter calls us just to rupture our eardrums.” 

Curt blinked the sleep out of his eyes a bunch more before flicking his gaze up to meet Arthur’s. Arthur’s eyes sparkled behind the rectangular frames of his glasses and a smirk played in the corners of his mouth.

“Nah,” Curt said. “Don’t know if I’m ready to be that respectable just yet.”

Arthur snorted and took the paper away. _Too late, old man_ , that snort said, but for his own fortification, they both pretended he was still the kind of rebel that flashed his taint on stage. Besides, true rebellion was grasping at happiness when the whole world tells you you don’t deserve it. Arthur had told him that once, a long time ago. Now, he dropped into the chair opposite Curt and stirred his tea.

“She’ll have a conniption,” he said.

“Then _she_ can get gay married if it means so much to her.”

Arthur’s laugh was a short puff of air. Curt chewed on his lip and hunched over his coffee, feeling suddenly small.

“Do you, though?” he said. “Want to. Honestly.”

Arthur sighed and looked out the window. They had their own house now, in a rather posh part of London. It had a courtyard for the three-legged pug they’d gotten Jamie when he was twelve. Even without the propriety of signatures on slips of papers, they were living a sickening bourgeois wet dream. Cutting gold records helped with that kind of thing. 

“It’s complicated,” Arthur said. “I have a lot of thoughts on the entire endeavor, but I’m already bored to tears by them in my own head, to say nothing of actually talking about them. I guess it comes down to this: if we do it, I want it to be because it’s what’s best for us, and because we’re soppy about each other. I don’t want it to be a symbol that’s no longer about the life we’ve made together. Our marriage, if we ever have one, will not be a ‘fuck you,’ yeah?”

Curt nodded.

“There’s work to be done,” Arthur said. “Shelters and outreach, STI prevention and hospice care, housing and anti-discrimination legislation. But you and me — we’re right settled, aren’t we?”

“Definitely,” Curt said. 

Arthur faced him again, smile as lovely as it was when he was seventeen and made of strawberries and cream. His face was lined with a lifetime of laughter, his hair more silver than brown, the skin around his eyes gone delicate and papery. Curt wanted to set his fingertip against the bead of moisture that had gathered there — dust or a yawn or something. Arthur was beautiful the way a shared life was beautiful. Curt, meanwhile, knew he resembled a crag on the surface of the moon more than anything, but once in a while, the man across the table still looked at him as if he’d never seen anything so astounding. It cut him off at the knees, every single time.

“Ask me someday,” Arthur said, “when your heart’s so full you can’t help what comes out of your mouth.” His lips tilted up on one side. “Maybe I’ll say yes.”

“Hey, bub, maybe I’m the one waiting for you to sweep me off my feet.”

“You’ve kept your girlish figure,” Arthur said. “I could definitely carry you over the threshold.”

Curt’s retort was going to be swift and devastating, but then Arthur’s iPhone buzzed to life on the table, a sound that never failed to send a unpleasant tingle up Curt’s spine. 

“Hell,” he muttered. 

Arthur pushed his glasses up his nose and looked at the screen, pulling his head back some to get it in focus. God, but they were getting old. It made Curt smile.

“Ready to face the music?” Arthur said, meeting his eyes over the table top.

“She’ll run the world someday,” Curt said.

“And Jamie will save it,” Arthur said.

He swiped the screen to accept the call.

—

Late that night, Curt got an idea. The idea lived in the music room, and he went there to commune with it.

There was a wolf. There was the embrace of the cold and gentle world it ran in. Passion and temperance. Savagery and quietude. Violence and beauty. 

It was a love story.

—

Arthur had gone soft all over, though there still wasn’t much extra to him. It was pleasant and felt good against all of Curt’s frayed nerves. Curt swept his hand down Arthur’s spine and absorbed the resulting sigh with his palm. The dip of the small of his back had a pair of dimples in it, sweet and lovely as ever, and the swell of his ass inspired a tenderness in Curt than sent his lips following the trail his fingertips made, skimming over the downy skin of his backside until a soft whine escaped Arthur’s throat and his legs fell open.

“You deserve poetry,” Curt said, nuzzling into his cheek. “But I’m just a hack, and every beautiful thing’s already been said.”

“Curt,” Arthur said, because he wasn’t a poet either. It was enough. They were enough. He pushed himself up onto his knees, shoulders planted on the mattress to anchor his splayed legs. “Curt, please,” he said. 

Curt whispered a new song into his skin as Arthur moaned into the pillows. Curt tasted him, and merged with him, and drank him down until even London was quiet outside their window.

On the mantle, a battered green pin gleamed, though no light set it aglow.

 

**End**


End file.
